Hathumoda, first abbess of Gandersheim, could have had a glorious afterlife. Agius, a monk-priest of the nearby abbey of Corvey—her confidant and perhaps a blood relative—was with her when she died.¹ Afterward, so he tells us, Agius consoled her bereaved sisters at Gandersheim, speaking movingly of Hathumoda’s long and painful passing and the significance of her life and death. Over the next two years he transformed those conversations into a consolatory dialogue in verse. At the same time, so that they, who could “no longer hold her or gaze at her in the flesh,” might at least “possess...

Bathed in the bliss of eternity, the dead commune with the living. So Bernard proclaims in his five Sermons for the Feast of All Saints.¹ For Bernard, commonality of experience establishes a sense of community between the happy dead and those who labor on pilgrimage. Our common experience of suffering and of sinfulness fuels our confidence in the saints and engenders sympathy for us in them. Furthermore, desire for God is common to the living and the dead; desire transports the longing soul to heaven to share—however partially—in the experience of saved souls, which is boundless desire for...

Robert of Uzès (d. 1296) had decidedly unusual tastes for a Dominican at the end of the thirteenth century, and his Book of Visions (Liber visionum) is a unique, largely unstudied, collection of thirty-seven visions produced during a period of great religious anxiety and instability—the long vacancy after the death of Pope Nicholas IV, the odd selection of the saintly-hermit Peter Marrone as successor, his resignation, and the subsequent election of Boniface VIII. The visions are preserved in two manuscripts, both of which also contain Robert’s only other known work, The Book of the Words of the Lord (Liber...

The new religious currents of the thirteenth century produced a remarkable literature of female sanctity. Hagiographers, especially in the Low Countries and Italy, wrote vivid accounts of the new female saints, not only of their asceticism and devotion but also of their powers. Those powers typically took the form of intercessions and revelations for the spiritual benefit of persons living and dead, consistently with what was supposed at the time to be a female predisposition toward visions and contact with the other world.¹ Among the most prolific of the hagiographers of such women was Thomas of Cantimpré (1200/01–ca. 1270),...

Angela of Foligno as daughter, mother, and wife has a chameleonlike character, to judge by the opinions of her many editors and commentators. She is variously adulterous spouse or mistreated wife, tender or detached mother, daughter overly devoted to her mother or one eager to break free. These multiple representations of Angela are striking because each is based on evidence from a single source, known as the Liber.⁵ The text lavishly describes Angela’s interior mystical journey along a path of penitence, poverty, and suffering, yet is virtually bereft of the sort of biographical details required to reconstruct her family life....

In the late 1280s a boy suffering from demonic possession begged his family to make the journey from Borgo San Sepolcro to the neighboring city of Cortona. There was, he told them, a woman in that city whose “prayers and good works” would help loosen the devil’s hold on him. According to a contemporary account, as the boy and his family made their pilgrimage up the steep hill to Cortona, “the devil could not endure the wall thrown up by [her] prayers, and with great agitations, as if he were tearing the boy apart, released him.”¹

The fortification of prayer...

Discussions of religious reform, or of different forms of religious life, are rare in Aquitanian sources from the tenth and early eleventh centuries.¹ It is particularly striking, therefore, when the chronicler Ademar of Chabannes records that Bishop Hilduin of Limoges (990–1014) reversed the policy of his elder brother and predecessor, Hildegar (ca. 976–990), toward the house of Eymoutiers: “Bishop Hilduin,” Ademar wrote, “with the devil urging him, three years before he died, destroyed the monastery of Saint-Étienne at Eymoutiers, which Hildegar had elegantly arranged with a great crowd of monks, and [Hilduin] returned canons there.”² This is not...

William v of Aquitaine, in charters issued on August 3, 1015, declared, “I, William, duke of Aquitaine and one mortal among others, have seen the power of many evil deeds not only among the people but also in the holy church, deeds which sprout from the root of the Arian heresy and of which we have never heard before my time.”¹ Writing about the trial of heretics at Orléans in 1022, Ademar of Chabbanes stated in his Chronicle, “At that time, ten of the canons of Sainte-Croix, who had seemed to be more religious than the others, were proven to...

Historians have difficulty understanding economic growth in the Middle Ages largely because we take it for granted. When it’s not there, as in the early Middle Ages, we either find reasons why it didn’t happen or imagine that, contrary to impressions, it did happen. But generally we assume that economic growth is natural, and that as soon as conditions permit, it appears. This is the basic view of the great economic historian Henri Pirenne, who postulated that in the newly peaceful conditions of the eleventh century, the dusty-footed merchants naturally began to ply their trade and markets sprang up.¹ More...

In a group of eleventh-century commercial letters from the eastern Mediterranean, we find the following comments:

1. The young man is not fit for anything and cannot do anything … Iqbāl will tell you about him … he will reach you and tell some of his miserable doings.¹

2. Please don’t stop writing to him so you can give him a nudge and push him to buy quickly. Otherwise, he’s going to keep his lids glued together and not open his eyes.²

3. The noble Avraham bar Ya‘qov was a busy boy this summer, selling what I had with him—stuff that had...

In a recent examination of the history of the idea of civil religion, I called attention to a passage in the Policraticus where John of Salisbury uses his twelfth-century understanding of spiritual interiority to demonstrate the civic utility of even non-Christian religions.¹ Here I want to expand that discussion to look more closely at the sources John relied on, and to consider how his novel argument, which may or may not have registered on subsequent thinkers, ought to be considered within the larger history of religious ideas.

The passage occurs in book 5, chapter 3, at the beginning of John’s...

At the end of the twelfth century the Paris master and theologian Peter the Chanter devoted a chapter of his handbook on ethics to the contaminating effects of sin. Discussing the impact of contact with sinners, Peter raises the specter of collective guilt and damnation by recalling the erring Israeli tribes, who had dared to build an altar in honor of a pagan god, with a warning from the Book of Joshua: “Because you erected an altar against God’s great and sacred word, tomorrow his anger will rage against all the people.” Peter’s own more prosaic words show that the...

Ever the most sober of reformers, Calvin nevertheless smiled when he thought about relics. He did not laugh—it is Luther who would have laughed—but we can infer at the very least that he smiled as he wrote his Traité des reliques, a satirical polemic he published in 1543 against traditional Catholic devotions to the saints, Mary, and Christ.¹

This is not to say that Calvin’s humor was particularly effective. What we can rather say is that Calvin intended his treatise to be funny or, perhaps more precisely, drôle. He took pleasure, and a certain degree of wry humor...

Scholarship on medieval culture and religion has been greatly enriched by attention to the body. Among other insights, this scholarship illuminates medieval perspectives on connections between body and soul and the thinking part of the person that we call the “mind.” Theorists today also highlight connections between thinking and embodiedness, and questions about how this embodied mind works are being approached in various disciplines—psychology, computer sciences, neurobiology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology—loosely connected by the term cognitive science. Some cognitive paradigms have been developed in or applied to the study of religion. This relatively new use of cognitive theory to...

One of the most intense imaginings of the blood of Christ appears in an English Carthusian manuscript of ca. 1460–1470, London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, on fol. 36v (fig. 15.1).¹ In a time when Passion imagery was virtually everywhere in England and on the continent,² this manuscript illustration stands apart for its unusual and perhaps unprecedented iconography, which accompanies a text by the mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1349).³ Not only does this picture highlight a whole range of beliefs and behaviors connected to the heart, wounds, blood,⁴ and Holy Name of Christ,⁵ providing particularly lucid evidence of what...

From late February to early March 1513, after Piero Soderini’s republican government had bowed to the consequences of military defeat at Prato and a foreign power had returned the Medici to Florence as more than first citizens, Niccolò Machiavelli spent three weeks as their political prisoner.² Then, on March 11, Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici became Pope Leo X. Florence celebrated with an amnesty, and Machiavelli, liberated to territorial confinement, spent the late spring and summer writing On Principalities (De principatibus).³ Although he would write many other things before his death in 1527, including works that gave him some literary standing among...

As historians we turn to those fragments of the past that speak to our own experience and concerns. I first became interested in the thirteenth-century mystic and ascetic Marie of Oignies, and in the writings of her biographer Jacques de Vitry, because I wanted to know more about the lived experiences and constructed genders of medieval women. Since 9/11/01, however, my scholarly priorities have been transformed; I wish to explore not only gender relations but also relations between the predominantly Christian West and the predominantly non-Christian East. And because propagandists both then and now justify armed conflict by highlighting differences,...

Of the many splendid objects to survive from medieval convents, one of the most enchanting is a small sculpture of the Virgin Mary and St. Elizabeth from the Swiss Dominican foundation of St. Katharinenthal, currently housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 18.1).¹ Made during the first decade of the fourteenth century by the workshop of Henry of Constance, the “Visitation Group” will doubtless be familiar to this volume’s readers as one of the many late medieval devotional images that, in Caroline Bynum’s words, “reflect[ed] and sanctif[ied] women’s domestic and biological experience.”² Citing Jeffrey Hamburger’s now-seminal study of monastic...

One of the reasons Dante’s magnum opus is called a “comedy” is its use of a comic register as the leading one. This choice forms the basis of the poem’s capability to encompass reality in all its spectra and to combine, for instance, myth with fragments of everyday life and chronicle, theoretical speculation with personal issues and political tirades, sublime love poetry with debased language, mystical ardor with spiteful irony. Like life or history, Dante’s Comedy assembles many disparate and diverse parts; as centuries of scholarship have shown, it is often by attempting to find new combinations of these many...

The vivid and complex imagery of alchemical texts has long interfered with scholars’ ability to understand alchemy and its significance to medieval society. Enigmatic code names such as “green lion,” “sun,” “moon,” and the crucified “Christ” are omnipresent in alchemical literature, even as such texts purport to reveal secret operations to readers. Earlytwentieth-century scholars such as E. O. von Lippmann and Julius Ruska were among the first to study such code names (Decknamen in German); their research, continued today by historians such as William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, attempts to decipher code names, in part by identifying them...

The tale of women riding the skies at night in the train of a huntress or warrior queen reaches far back in the folk history of Europe. One of the earliest medieval references to it occurs in a collection of canons compiled in the early tenth century by Abbot Regino of Prüm, from which source it was quoted and cited until it achieved classic status in the version included by Master Gratian of Bologna in his twelfth-century Concordia discordantium canonum, or Decretum, as causa 26, question 5, canon 12, the notorious Canon Episcopi. A compilation of two texts, both probably...